A recent outbreak of a "plague" in a popular online game has scientists considering how the virtual world may provide clues to what people would do in real-world pandemics. In the role-playing game World of Warcraft, a "corrupted blood" spell killed characters and affected players in unexpected ways.

2017-10-08

Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble published as part of the “Experimental Futures” series by Duke Press. There are interesting books (from the brief number of full descriptions I read). I got Donna’s and Beautiful Data (pdfs).

2017-10-14

K2 winter school. It's a weeklong event set to confront the boundary of design by having design futurists, design educators facilitate a workshop together with students, citizens, young designers ... and look at contemporary real social issues as their design challenges.
I think the workshop itself is interesting because it's not only teaching design thinking but also asking why design thinking didn't work in some fields/topics.
The talks they have in between were trying to explore the possible discipline change, paradigm shit in near future.

2017-10-23

> We’re generally working on a timeline of 5–15 years from now, and always at multiple scales because without finding possibilities that are mutually beneficial to individuals and the larger publics they participate in, there’s no “civic” to speak of.

2017-10-25

File under 'better late than never'. NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA...

> Public and Collaborative NYC is a program of activities, developed by Parsons DESIS Lab to explore how public services in New York City can be improved by incorporating greater citizen collaboration in service design and implementation.

At Transportation Camp over the weekend, I led an impromptu discussion session on the challenges we face and lessons we could learn from the looming L train shutdown. (You haven’t forgotten about the L train shutdown in my absence, right?) A room full of biased transportation policy wonks came to the general conclusion that the …